Appetizing

Helpful food-related apps

There are a great deal of food-related apps out there, and I’ve found a lot of them easy to use and really helpful. These three free apps are my personal favorites. They’re are also highly rated and recommended across the board. The first is a restaurant finder, the second is a recipe finder and the third is a calorie-counter. These should keep all your food needs covered.

This app is great for finding restaurants based on location, type of cuisine and expense level (designated by one, two, three or four dollar signs). It allows you to discover new places to eat by taking your location and finding places near you. It also organizes by cuisine, price and what’s open for places near you on the home screen. The app gives you the ability to search for restaurants as well, and there’s a feature called “Shake.” This allows you to lock one or two of the three categories —location, type of cuisine, or expense level—and press the “Shake” button to find a restaurant that fits your specifications. There are also filters that you can use to do things like set a maximum distance, exclude chain restaurants, include only popular restaurants or choose only places open for certain meals. You can go to the “Nearby” section from the home screen to get a list, with a map, of restaurants in order of distance to your location. It also links in with Facebook and Twitter to allow you to check-in to restaurants. The “Shake” option is my personal favorite way to use this app. And it’s free.

Maybe I’m partial to apps that have some kind of randomize feature, but that’s also my favorite part of this app. You can choose the “dish type,” what you want the main ingredient to be and the length of time that you want to spend preparing your meal, and then hit “Spin” to get a recipe. What’s great is that the “dish type” isn’t restricted to breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can also choose cookies, side dish, beverage, main dish, dessert, appetizer, bread and others. The ingredients are varied and allow you to add your own, too. There’s an option to add your favorite recipes in a bookmarked section and to search for recipes with “Dietary Filters” like vegetarian, low fat, no wheat and others. And if you create a free account, you can keep your shopping list on this app as well. There is a section of featured recipes for quick looks, and each recipe is rated on a five-star scale (along with how many people have reviewed them). This makes it simple to figure out if the recipe is worth trying.

I like this calorie-counting app best because it’s simple to use and navigate, and it covers all aspects of weight loss with its features. After you enter your personal information and statistics, it lets you create a custom weight loss plan with daily calorie intake and an end date. It helps with your plan by allowing you to log your meals and has a barcode scanner for easier entry. It also allows you to set up recipes and share them, too.